by R. N. Morris
Quinn’s first instinct was to deny Macadam’s request. He wanted to be alone when he confronted the body. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to stay with the car?’
Macadam must have sensed his resistance. He didn’t push it. ‘What do we have then, sir? An interesting case?’
‘Certainly the case does appear to have some unusual features. The body was drained entirely of blood.’
Macadam gave a whistle. ‘Who’s the victim?’
‘Identity unknown, as yet.’
‘Anything to go on?’
‘He appears to have engaged in unnatural practices with other men.’
‘Ah. One of those. In that case, he may have a criminal record, sir. Gross indecency, vagrancy, soliciting. That sort of thing. There could be a mugshot in the Rogues’ Gallery. I take it you have a photograph of the corpse, sir? We might be able to match them up.’
‘Good thinking, Macadam. Given his youthfulness, we need not go back too far.’
‘We’ll go back as far as it takes, sir.’
Macadam accelerated to overtake a horse-drawn collier’s van as they pulled out on to Commercial Road. In keeping with the street’s name, the road was interspersed with business premises on both sides, but there was a rundown air to most of them. The traffic was sparse. Clusters of men sheltered beneath shop awnings, their faces an array of skin shades from Nordic to African. The same expression of sullen boredom was engrained on them all, beneath incongruously English flat caps. Sailors without a ship, they could offer little in the way of custom to the local shops. A group of them huddled in the entrance of a beer shop, presumably without the funds to go inside. They scowled across at a ship-breaking concern, as if they held it responsible for their misfortune.
Through the arch of a railway viaduct, Quinn had a glimpse of the merchant ships in Regent’s Canal Lock. The masts and rigging were stripped, the funnels denuded of smoke, the engines idle: a dejected, sodden vignette. For the briefest of moments he entertained a fantasy of escape, imagining himself borne away on one of these long, low vessels, away from the unrelenting dampness of the English spring to a far-flung, sun-blasted outpost of the Empire. Away, too, from the sickening nastiness of his new case and from the necessity to go where he was now going. The grim photographs of the victim had formed a monochrome area of unease at the centre of his mind, a premonition of impending difficulty and pain.
But the promise of escape was gone the moment it was glimpsed. The image of the boats now felt like a dream he couldn’t quite recall. There was to be no other end to his journey today than the mortuary.
Despite his reputation, Quinn had no appetite for the grisly side of the job. He had a horror of cadavers. He had felt it as a medical student, and perhaps it had contributed to his precipitous abandonment of that career. The nightmares he had experienced in the immediate aftermath of his breakdown were peopled with the dead.
His father was among their number, of course; in these dreams he had been both dead and not dead. The great healer had used his talents to bring himself back to life. He had also been able to reanimate anonymous corpses based on the cadavers Quinn had seen in the dissecting room. In some cases, the reanimation was extremely limited, the twitch of a hand, the swivel of eyes, the upheaval of swallowing in the throat. One or two raised themselves to sitting position. At which point, Quinn’s father would turn to him, the glare of defiant pride in his eyes.
The dreams did not end there. How could they? They were born out of mental illness and collapse. And so he was denied the usual relief of waking at the worst point of the nightmare.
Quinn turned his gaze to the other side of the street, as if he were looking away from the morbid images of his old dreams. The Limehouse Liberal and Radical Association presented an innocuous, even respectable, facade. It brought to mind the agitation of the living rather than of the dead, the complex, compromised struggles of political aspiration.
They passed Limehouse Town Hall and turned right into Three Colt Street, Macadam gratuitously sounding the horn as he made the manoeuvre. The sound disrupted Quinn’s thoughts. He was about to rebuke Macadam but relented. Perhaps his thoughts needed disrupting. They had been drifting away from the case.
He kept his gaze fixed on the looming, soot-blackened tower of St Anne’s church, as if its sinister, almost fantastical presence held the key to the mystery he was investigating. What strange rite had been performed in the sacrifice and bleeding of that unknown young man? The sergeant at Shadwell had pointed the finger at the Jews. No doubt the man was an imbecile, but Quinn had an idea that the method of slaughter insisted upon under Jewish law placed emphasis on the removal of blood.
Dangerous, dangerous, thought Quinn, as he watched the church recede. He remembered Sir Edward’s vague warning about foreign influences and precarious balances in the East End. He would have to tread carefully, there was no doubt.
Before long they had turned into Limehouse Causeway. Quinn noticed the increase in Chinese names on the shop fronts. The mysterious strokes and dashes of the alien language fascinated him. He mistrusted the innocuous English translations that appeared alongside: Grocer’s, Laundry, General Stores. So where were the signs for the opium dens and gambling houses? he wondered.
Like the sailors he had noticed earlier, the Chinamen he saw were dressed in the uniform of the English labouring poor. There were no long ponytails, no silk tunics or straw coolie hats; just black serge and cloth caps.
Chinatown continued across the West India Dock Road into Penny Fields. It ended as abruptly as it had begun as that road turned into Poplar High Street.
The Poplar Coroner’s Court was a recently constructed red-brick building with stone-mullioned windows, a compromise between the nostalgic romanticism of the architect and the parsimony of the local borough council. The front entrance on Poplar High Street was a somewhat grandiose affair, studded doors in a vaguely medieval style set into an arched doorway.
The mortuary was a separate building at the rear, connected by a covered way. The styling was more functional: most of those who entered by the rear were beyond being impressed by architectural gestures.
Macadam parked in the alley that ran along the side of the building, close to the entrance to the yard.
Quinn passed the file over to him. ‘I suggest you familiarize yourself with the details of the case while you wait for me.’
Unlike some of the crude sheds and improvised dead-houses Quinn had visited, the Poplar mortuary was planned and built along rational lines, in keeping with the latest scientific thinking. The sanitation and drainage facilities were exemplary. And as Macadam had said, it was fitted with the latest electrical refrigeration equipment. There were two mortuary rooms, the one furthest from the coroner’s court being reserved for victims of infectious diseases. The post-mortem room was at the rear of that, with a laboratory and stores adjoining. The mortuary complex had been completed just three years earlier, and so it still had about it an air of newness that its daily contact with the dead had not yet eradicated.
Quinn’s energetic knocking belied his reluctance to enter. The only way to overcome your fears is to throw yourself into them, he decided. Besides, he wanted to get out of the rain.
Quinn kept up the hammering until the door was opened by a caretaker in a leather apron and black bowler hat. With his grey, sunken face, he reminded Quinn of the animated dead of his dreams. As the door was opened, another man with his jacket lapels pulled up around his face slipped out from behind the caretaker and ran across the yard to the exit.
Quinn gave his head a quick shake of distracted surprise. ‘I am Inspector Quinn of the Special Crimes Department. I have come to examine the body found at London Docks.’
The caretaker’s face cracked open. His grin revealed gums endowed with isolated teeth of monumental length. It was in the gaps between the teeth that the secret of his sunken cheeks lay revealed. ‘Ah, yes. A fine specimen. Doctor Bugsby says he ain’t never seen one so big.’
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sp; Quinn pushed his way past the man. ‘I’m not interested in that.’
‘No?’ The caretaker seemed disappointed. ‘A prodigy of nature, is what Doctor Bugsby called it. Like a comet or a ee-clipse. Such a thing might only come round once in a man’s life. While you’re here you may as well look upon it. You may regret it if you don’t.’
Quinn was struck by a sudden suspicion. ‘My man, I had better not discover that you have been charging members of the public money in order to view this corpse.’
‘No, no,’ said the caretaker emphatically, but not wholly convincingly. He hurried ahead of Quinn down the corridor. ‘This way then, sir. He’s in the first mortuary room.’
Quinn paced after him. ‘Who was that individual whom you let out as I came?’
‘Him? Oh, that was . . . William. William helps me out now and then.’
‘Is Doctor Bugsby here?’
‘Not today, sir. He is at his surgery today.’
‘Does Doctor Bugsby know about your arrangement with this William?’
‘He knows there’s always much to do,’ said the caretaker vaguely.
Quinn felt the chill of the mortuary room at the root of every hair on his body. Every follicle seemed to clench in a repulsive reaction. He was aware of a strange resonance, to which the atoms of his being were compelled to respond, rearranging themselves in a fatal alignment. He felt it as a low thrumming in the air. He cocked his head to locate the source.
‘What’s that sound?’ Quinn’s voice was hushed, fearful.
‘That’s the refrigerator. We have a refrigerator, you see. The doctor likes to keep the bodies cold.’
‘Yes, of course. I forgot. I had heard that the mortuary rooms here were equipped with refrigeration units.’
Now wearing protective leather gloves, the caretaker crossed to one of the small enamelled doors that filled one wall. Quinn felt his heart throb in time to the room’s vibration as the man grasped the gleaming handle of the door. ‘He’s in here.’
As the door opened, the temperature of the room dropped perceptibly. A fine haze of frozen particles swam around the aperture. The long drawer on which the body lay was pulled out on well-oiled runners. The dead man emerged briskly, head first.
‘That’s far enough,’ said Quinn. The body was out as far as the chest.
It was the unnatural pallor of the flesh that repulsed him most. It was the pallor that he wanted to push back into the freezing compartment and hide away forever. The skin was roughly stitched together along the sweeping incisions made at the post-mortem examination, like a patchwork of fine, translucent gauze lying over frail bones. The musculature was slight, wasted away, as if the young man was undernourished. He had lived on his nerves, by the looks of him. His head almost seemed out of proportion, or perhaps it was just that it was so physically riveting – even in death, even with the colour drained from his flesh by a savage wound – that the rest of him could not compete.
And the wound, it was almost a relief to look away from the unbearable pallor of the flesh into the dark edges of that strangely neat, strangely deliberate parting at his throat.
‘Do you not want to see . . .’ the caretaker paused facetiously, ‘. . . the other wounds? The marks on his wrists and ankles?’
Quinn nodded. The drawer slid out further. The arms lay at the side of the body, touchingly delicate at the wrists where the damage had been inflicted. The photographs had not done justice to the sharp intensity of the bruises. Quinn believed he could make out the imprint of the rope that had bound him.
And of course, now, he could not avoid confronting the man’s penis.
‘There, see, I told you,’ said the caretaker. ‘A monster, ain’t it?’
‘Turn the arm over for me,’ said Quinn brusquely. ‘I want to look at the underside.’
‘Do you not want to do it yourself? They say it’s good luck to touch ’em.’
Quinn frowned away the comment. But perhaps there was something in what the caretaker said.
Is this why I do it? he wondered. For this moment?
Quinn reached out and touched the frozen shock of dead flesh. He turned the arm over quickly. The fleshier underside was deeply indented, the skin broken. He withdrew his hand hurriedly and shook it, as if that would be enough to rid it of any contamination.
The Wall
The Special Crimes Department occupied an attic room in the northernmost building of New Scotland Yard. It had a sharply sloped ceiling, interrupted by a dormer window. Quinn himself was just short of six feet tall. He was only able to stand up straight at the highest part of the room. He frequently forgot this, especially when rising from his desk.
More or less the same height as their chief, Sergeants Inchball and Macadam also brought a great deal of physical bulk to the department. It was a cramped space for three big policemen.
The photographs that Quinn had tacked to the one full-length wall seemed to reduce the space even more. It was not a wall any decent person would want to go anywhere near. It turned one corner of a perfectly respectable red-brick and granite building into a cubicle of Hell.
Only Quinn showed any willingness to approach the wall. For the briefing, Inchball and Macadam were forced to huddle, bowed, beneath the incline of the roof. It seemed an appropriate posture in which to face the savagery depicted.
Quinn had had one other photograph made, an enlargement of the inside of the cigarette case, showing the inscription:
To be entirely free
D.P.
Inchball frowned. His brows flowed together in a slow, viscous ripple. Macadam scratched his scalp, visible through the sparse stubble of his razor cut. Both men exchanged perplexed glances: it seemed the chief had finally lost it.
Quinn knew that he was overexcited, or that that was how it would seem to his men. He knew that they would look at the neat calligraphic script blown up large and wonder what all the fuss was about.
‘Who of us can say that he is truly free? From the moment of our birth, we are bound to others. As children, we are subject to the rule of our parents. As adults, we are constrained by the conventions and expectations of society. By the necessity to earn a crust. By the obligations placed on us by our fellows. The ties that bind us are the claims of our common humanity. It is only by renouncing those claims, by severing those bonds, that we are able to break free. Every transgression, every act of rebellion, is a moment of freedom. The schoolboy who steals an apple from an orchard.’ Quinn glanced at the photograph of the unidentified victim’s anus. ‘The young man who rents out his arse to strangers. The depraved monster who pays for that accommodation and slits the throat and drains the blood of the one providing it. The greater the crime, the greater the freedom. Freedom is rooted in power. He who is powerful is free. And there is no more power-filled act than the taking of a life. To be entirely free, gentlemen. To be entirely free! That is why one kills. And that is why I am in no doubt that this cigarette case is a gift from the murderer. A gift for us.’
‘Away with the fairies,’ muttered Inchball, who had a habit of saying whatever was on his mind. It was largely on account of this habit that Quinn had wanted him on his team.
‘What was that, Inchball?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘I distinctly heard you say something.’
Inchball did not need much prompting. ‘Begging your pardon, sir, with respect and all that, but I have known some murderers in my life. Some of them have been what I would call, sir, pathetic individuals. Would not say boo to a goose to look at them, that is, sir.’
‘Very good, Inchball. As ever, I value your contribution. Your point is well made. But it does not contradict what I was saying. One may be powerless and downtrodden in every other aspect of one’s life, defeated and depressed by countless frustrations. But to the extent that one is capable of depriving another of life –’
‘Of murder, sir? It’s murder what you are talking about?’
‘Yes, Inchball.’
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nbsp; ‘Then I would be obliged to you, sir, if you would use the word. Let’s call a spade a spade, I say, sir. All this talk of depriving individuals of life. Murder, sir. That’s what it is.’
‘Thank you, Inchball. Where was I? Yes. To the extent that one is capable of murder – and especially in the moment of committing it – one is all powerful. Before that point, the frustrations accumulate. The destructive emotion – we might call it rage – intensifies, until at last it cannot be denied. It must be sated. The power must be allowed to flow. Blood must be shed.’
‘Well, sir,’ said Inchball. ‘You certainly sound like you know what you are talking about. But if I may say, sir, where does it get us?’
‘It gets us closer to the murderer. Mark my words, this cigarette case will take us to him.’
‘We’ve had it dusted for prints, sir,’ said Macadam in a discouraging tone. Macadam was a great one for the scientific approach to policing. He frequently attended lectures, subscribed to a number of incomprehensible journals, and was forever suggesting to Quinn that the department employ the services of this or that expert to help them in their investigations. He had been Sir Edward’s choice, but Quinn valued him all the same, because his approach was so different to his own.
Quinn hesitated a beat before asking, ‘And?’
‘Nothing, sir. Well, nothing once they had discarded certain extraneous prints. If you don’t mind me saying, sir, if you could remember to don the cotton gloves when handling items of material evidence, it really would make the forensic boys’ lives a lot easier. Mind you, you’re not the only one. Apparently, the inspector at Shadwell had left his prints all over it too.’
‘I find the gloves . . . get in the way.’ Quinn avoided Macadam’s disapproving glower.
‘Well, it’s something to aim for, isn’t it, sir? A target, we might say.’ Macadam gave a small mime of flexing and releasing the string on an archer’s bow. Because of the stoop imposed by the sloping ceiling, the imaginary arrow was aimed at Quinn’s foot.
‘Did the forensic boys find anything at all that might enlighten us?’ Quinn hoped that by using Macadam’s term he might appease him.
